It’s no secret that, for most of us, December is a time of low occupancy.
As the holidays approach, business slows to a crawl, and people stay home
and spend time with their loved ones, which is probably why the divorce
and murder rates spike in early January. People who would otherwise
be staying in your hotel are at home instead, shopping, decorating, and
freezing outdoors all night in a queue awaiting the opportunity to buy
whatever new video-game system is fashionable among spoiled children this
year. So if there aren’t many guests in your rooms, what’s the next
best thing? Drunks in your ballroom. It’s holiday party time!

You know the drill. First, you send your most expendable staff
member into the depths of the storage room to extract the plastic poinsettias
and blow the dust off them, and spend three hours assembling the artificial
tree, whose storage box is now just a few random strips of soggy cardboard.
You hang twinkly lights on the ficus in the lobby, which causes it to lose
its three remaining leaves. Someone is sent to the craft store to
replace the holiday décor that was stolen by last years’ revelers.

Every group wants its holiday party to happen on a weekend. That’s
because businesses know their employees will be hung over and nonproductive
the next day, and would prefer that the office not ring with the seasonal
sounds of dry heaves. There are a limited number of weekend days
between now and next year, so you want to optimize the size of groups you
book, particularly if you are charging “by the head.” A successful
party booking is one where only two-thirds of the partygoers will fit in
the assigned room. That’s because, at any given time, one-third of
the revelers are wandering the lobby harassing your few actual guests,
chasing the pretty new secretary down the hallway, or smoking on the loading
dock huddled like hobos.

Have your carpet extractor serviced before the party season begins.
That’s because holiday parties inevitably serve red wine, which was used
by ancient civilizations as indelible fabric dye, and holiday revelers
spill it onto every available surface – carpets, linens, their boss’s shirt.
Some show-off will try to demonstrate the tablecloth-pulling trick, not
noticing the full glasses of red wine on the table. Consider adding
one ounce of 3M “Scotchgard” to every bottle of red wine, for easier clean-up
later. It will make people sick if they drink it, but they’re going
to be sick anyway. By the end of the evening, your restrooms will
be full of partygoers calling Ralph and Roy on the big porcelain phone.
I know of one hotel who had a plumber remove a toilet the day after a party,
to try to find an important client’s false teeth.

In the interests of economy, few holiday parties feature sit-down dining,
which is good from a labor-cost viewpoint, but pressures your F&B profitability.
Luckily, there are a number of inexpensive “finger foods” that can be given
fancy names and prices. An olive, speared with a toothpick to the
top of a Chicken McNugget and renamed “pollo olivio,” can have a profit
margin of over 50%. Cheez Whiz, spread on a cheap cracker, takes
on an upscale look and taste if sprinkled with paprika and Rice Crispies.
Since everyone impressed if caviar is served at parties, but no one actually
eats it, look for inexpensive jars of salmon eggs sold as fly-fishing bait.
Balls of deep-fried cornbread dough (known here in the southern U.S. as
“hushpuppies”) are both inexpensive, and soak up 27 times their own weight
in alcohol.

Finally, plan on keeping staff on hand for at least 3 hours after the
party is scheduled to end. Not only will there be massive breakdown
and clean-up, but there will be sick and staggering partygoers who cannot
be unleashed upon the outside world, and there will be one-night romances.
Inevitably someone will pull the fire alarm at 3 A.M. to see which scantily-clad
people stumble out of rooms together. Anyone wandering the halls
at 3 A.M. with a digital camera is a false-fire-alarm suspect.

We’ll survive the holiday party season, we always do, and sober business
and leisure travelers will return in the spring. Until then, a ballroom
full of drunks may be the best we can do.

Larry Mundy works for a hotel company in Dallas. His views
are his own, and may differ considerably from those of a sane person."